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Friday, May 26, 2006

Presentations in Latex

Been lacking technical articles on the blog, Well some are gonna follow now. The current post focuses on making a presentation in Latex.

Why?Because Latex allows you to write the equations the way they should be and displays them the best. Besides the funda of Open Format (no strings) etc is upon you to decide ;)

How?I have seen two alternatives for making presentation in latex,

Prosper

Beamer

both of them are very similar and requires little effort for installation.Installation: Prosper and Beamer are available on net for download. Just download the tar file.Beamer1) You will also need to download the packages pgf and xcolor which are available in the above beamer link too. On untarring (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) you get directories say beamer, pgf and xcolor.2) Move the directory to the path /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex. or try reading this link for more ways.3) After this just need to run the command texhash and you are done.

ProsperInstallation is much more simple. You can just add the path to directory proper into the $TEXINPUTS variable. by say export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/path/to/prosperdir

Actuall PDF makingBeamer.A sample presentation tex file is as simple as this one.

Compilation:Normally presentation classes need to be compiled to pdf before you can view it. xdvi can't show the output properly. So you need to give commands latex filedvipdf fileyou can actualy view the resulting file using xpdf or acroread.

Would like to thank Paresh for introduction to these presentation classes of latex.